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Sunday, May 01, 2011

Four Buses, Two Sites, Tons of Fun

For all of you cheap and environmentally sensitized urban dads out there, did I have a day out with the kids for the ages. With our Please Touch Museum membership expiring, I decided to take Aaron and Jada there one last time. And, because I am with Transpass, we decided to go all SEPTA. So we grabbed one bus a block from our house, got off, picked up a second bus across the street, and took that to a block away from Please Touch.

The kids have been about 40+ times, so while they had a blast at their familiar haunts, I don't think we'll be going again for a long time. So we lived it up, riding on the carousel three times as a last hurrah. Then we hit the gift shop, a first in all the times we've been, because they were having an insane clearance sale. I ended up with about $60 worth of stuff for barely five bucks. Kids happy, Dad happy.

I wasn't sure what the bus schedule was from there, so I took the kids to the front of the museum and we waited on the sidewalk, munching on the lunch I had packed for us. Five minutes into lunch, the bus arrived, so we hopped on, stuffing our half-eaten items back into my tote bag. The bus wound all through West Philadelphia before crossing over into Center City down the Parkway to City Hall.

We got off at Broad Street, right in the middle of our second stop, which was the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. Man, what a sight. Thousands of people congregated on South Broad, milling about street performers, multiple sound stages, and all sorts of booths for kids and grown-ups. After we finished our lunch and threw away all our trash, the kids quickly scored free smoothies and free balloons, while I took photos and video as much as I could. I particularly enjoyed the way they decorated the street to resemble a fair: it's not every day you can walk on grass, sit at a table, or admire floral arrangements all in the middle of a usually busy urban thoroughfare.

We hoofed it two whole blocks to the rerouted bus stop for our line home. Within minutes, it arrived to whisk us back to our neighborhood, where we got off, walked less than a block, went inside, and examined all of the free loot we had scored. Not a bad way to spend a pretty Saturday.